This page showcases the southernmost city of Texas; Brownsville as photographed by McAllen Architecture & World Heritage Photographer, Pino Shah. The Mexican city across the border is Matamoros. Three bridges connect the two cities.

Brownsville Architecture: A Visual History with narratives by writer, Eileen Mattei from Harlingen showcases 114 buildings over 156 pages.

There is an old saying "The pen is mightier than the sword" coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839 (Wiki).

Perhaps, you have been contemplating writing a book for some time now. You have the book in your mind or your heart or your soul and are ready to see it in either a print or eBook or audio format. But, you don't know where to start. That is where I was on June 26, 2016.

I went through a massively steep learning curve in a short time and purely, as a result of blessings, given my technology, business, digital media and online publishing background, I was able to publish five books since then. In September of 2017, I was exhausted from the frustrations of the book industry learning curve. For a week, I went into self-pity mode and enjoyed feeling sorry for myself. Eventually, I started praying and contemplating and asking God as to why was I having to go through what I went through? Why didn't I have the resources to hire someone to do all the work? Now, know that I am the one that chose to go the self-publishing route because I did not have the means to hire/outsource the production of books.

Nor was the topic of my book attractive enough to get the attention of a publisher that would make it easy for me to just focus on the content and them take care of everything else. God answered and His answer was that the purpose of making me go through the intensively frustrating learning experience was so that I could help others by way of sharing with them the simple way to get published. Aha! It produced optimism. Within 48 hours, I was meeting library directors in the Hidalgo county that were open to the possibility of me doing pilot workshops to coach folks wanting to publish. Edinburg, Mission and McAllen public libraries were gracious enough to let me do the workshops at their respective facilities. Based on each workshop's feedback and questions asked by the participants, I fine tuned the curriculum for the workshop that I do at the libraries (no cost for you to attend).

So, without further ado, here are the things to consider as you decide you want to publish:

INTRODUCTION

List your five reasons for writing a book - in order of importance. Think of only one book at a time for this exercise.